


Dancing in the Dark

by urusai_lilania



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Best Friends, Character Death, Don't copy to another site, Established Relationship, F/M, Gen, Implied Relationships, Love, Patterns, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Pregnancy, Relationship(s), Rituals, Secrets, Stress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-03 17:06:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19468351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/urusai_lilania/pseuds/urusai_lilania
Summary: Clint lives two lives, even if they do tend to intermingle. They're equally important to him, and he's worked hard to keep them separate. But the bleed-through still gets to him, and he wonders if this is the only life he'll lead.





	Dancing in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> This is a little number I've been slowly working on since Endgame's release. Fair warning, it doesn't touch on the specific spoiler long but it's post-Endgame events by the end of the story. My main goal with this was to not just throw Laura under a bus!

Natasha was staring, openly. She knew full-well how to study a target without letting on that she was doing it, but she was utterly failing to bother in this moment, standing over Clint as he leaned down to inspect the navigation panel of the quinjet. He turned to give her a dopey little grin over his shoulder, hoping it would calm her obviously-stressed nerves. He tried not to let his expression falter under her stare; quickly he redirected his attention back to the navigation panel. His flippant demeanor would melt away if he maintained eye contact with her suspicious stare. Everything seemed operational… Always a blessing.

“Clint. You’d tell me if there was any trouble, wouldn’t you?”

Oh no. Not this again. He chuckled dismissively, standing up and stretching his arms one last time, relishing in the temporary distraction of his sore shoulders. There was a decent flight ahead of them. “Quinjet’s fine, Nat. We’ll make it home in one piece.”

Her head tilted ever-so-slightly, Nat pursed her lips. Frustration. “I’m serious.”

“What, don’t tell me you don’t trust me again?”

She looked away finally, staring through the windscreen with a look of concern. “No, I just…”

“Just?”

“Nothing, I guess…”

“You worry too much, Nat,” he said softly, gently tugging her arm and pulling her into an affectionate head-butt.

She scoffed, seeming to give in to his mood. As they pulled apart, she said, “You don’t worry enough.”

Clint stared at her for a long moment before suddenly diving into the pilot’s seat and strapping in. “Heh. You got me. Where do you want me to drop you off?”

Mimicking him, Natasha secured her belts and licked her lips. The cloud had finally passed. “Headquarters is fine. You heading to the homestead?”

“Yeah. I need to work on the barn a bit. It’s a total wreck.”

“Should just demo it and build you a new one.”

“You know, I’d love to, but I’d need to finish the dining room first… Laura will have my head if I start something else.”

“I’m pretty sure she’s always got it, actually.”

“Got a point there.”

Shifting about in her seat with a sly smile, Natasha added, “And _I’ve_ always got a point.”

~~~

Clint still couldn’t get over parking the quinjet on the land Director Fury had provided for his family to live peacefully on. There were lots of strings pulled, and still more attached, but it was a pretty great life, all things considered. The quinjet powered down, he grabbed his duffel bag from the gear storage and exited. It was a small jaunt from where he landed to the front door, and the sun had long since set, but he had a torch and the house’s security lights were rigged to come on as he neared it.

Quietly he let himself in, gently setting the bag down beside the door and taking off his boots. The familiar first steps of a hypnotic ritual. “Long day?”

The hairs on the back of his neck raised—not from fear, but from being caught. Any delay in his ritual meant it’d take even longer before he could return to his real life. He stood up, a well-practiced wry smile gracing his lips. “Hey. Didn’t want to wake you.”

“It’s fine. I needed the bathroom.”

“Shouldn’t you have gone upstairs?”

“Saw the security lights. Welcome home.” Laura reached out with open arms and cautiously hugged her husband, careful of her belly.

“Let’s get you back to bed, yeah?”

“You coming with?” she returned, arching her brow.

“In a few, promise. Just need to unpack a few things beforehand.” Laura knew what he meant. His ritual hadn’t escaped her notice. With a silent nod, she gave him a warm smile and carefully made her way back up the stairs. Watching her go, Clint resisted the urge to move the master bedroom downstairs; this would be the last pregnancy. Even with S.H.I.E.L.D.’s assistance, he could scarcely afford another, _especially_ with Laura being left on her own so often lately, what with the Avenger business going on. Three was more than enough, he reasoned. The kids played catch together and enjoyed cooking and helping their mother. Soon enough, little Natasha would join the fray.

Clint shuddered reflexively. It felt a little strange, naming his next child after Natasha. Okay, _more_ than strange. But Laura insisted; Nat had wormed her way into their lives and was as close a thing to family as it got for the isolated Bartons. Sighing, Clint left his duffel bag in the entrance and went into the lower bathroom to vigorously splash his face with cold water.

Looking at himself in the mirror, he let loose a long, heavy lungful of stale air. Coming home to such a… _normal_ setting felt queer to him recently. The Avengers had initiated clean-up duty, attempting to retrieve Loki’s scepter that had somehow been secreted away by HYDRA in transit. So far, there hadn’t been any clues on the network as to its location, but something as radioactive as that damnable glowstick couldn’t stay hidden forever. It literally tempted those around it into using it. And he highly doubted HYDRA could resist such temptation long.

The other Avengers didn’t have family lives to concern themselves with. The closest was Tony, who had Pepper and his business. Steve threw his entire being into working for S.H.I.E.L.D. these days, Thor was cheerfully spending his downtime in celebrity status and exploring “Midgard”, Bruce was spending most of his time with Tony and Pepper at the tower. And Nat…

Well, she’d become a bit of a mystery all over again.

Clint had his home life and his work life, and while home knew full well his work, work didn’t really know his home. No one honestly _asked_ , but he wasn’t about to spill the beans either. When you had a party host like Tony for a teammate, it made little sense to meet up elsewhere. But Natasha knew, knew in such an intimate way that she more than made up for the rest of the team’s ignorance.

But that wasn’t why Clint found himself confronted with these twisted knots in his stomach whenever he returned home. Wasn’t why he always disappeared to sort out his thoughts the first day back, instead of being there for Laura and the kids. Wasn’t why he buried his head beneath home renovation projects to keep from thinking too hard on it all. No, it was all because of the sharp juxtaposition between his lives crashing together in those moments. The bleed-through.

Laura and Natasha, they meant everything to him, _both_ of them, far more than they should. Clint loved them both dearly, and on some of the longer nights, he wasn’t entirely sure he was living the life he wanted to live. He caught himself wondering if another him, in another life, was with another Natasha. If he couldn’t have been that version of him.

Laura knew. Natasha… well, Clint wasn’t sure. She knew once upon a time, but did her best to stay impartial, to keep from tangling him up. Hell, he wasn’t even sure how she felt about him now. Couldn’t bring himself to ask. It wasn’t his place, right?

At first, he had thought of Natasha as a wayward sister, a kindred spirit. He hadn’t realized _how much_ of a kindred spirit she really was though, not at first. They worked well together, and Nat still needed to be watched for a time, so Director Fury had the pair working side by side on missions. He trusted Clint to handle her, if the need arose. There was no escaping her at that point.

Every time he came home from a mission with the fiery Russian, Clint was faced with the harsh reality that his actual wife Laura wasn’t the only person he cared about so passionately anymore. It wasn’t right, was it? They had two children together, and she was pregnant with their third. He wouldn’t use the excuse of “if it weren’t for the kids…” because he hadn’t married Laura for the kids, dammit, he had married Laura _for Laura_. And she understood him and respected his work and supported him and loved him for all his terrible black heart.

But Nat… Nat knew the deeper shades of him that he couldn’t bring home to Laura. Wouldn’t. He didn’t want to change his amazing, strong, supportive wife in any way. He wasn’t sure he could handle her realizing _just how deep_ the still waters within him were, just how dark the blackness within him could be. He’d only thrown up a few hasty sandbags to block the floodwaters. Sooner or later, they’d lose the battle to the tide.

Clint was comfortable with his life, but he also craved the deep connection he had with Natasha. She had come around long after Laura, that was the main problem. Laura had been Clint’s first real relationship after his train-wreck of a childhood, and he didn’t see a reason for any other at that point in his life. They’d married, had children. Laura had given up a lot to be with the mysterious Clint, even though she shouldn’t have needed to. She had made the choice to dive headfirst into this strange life with him, for better or for worse. S.H.I.E.L.D. needed him to keep as low to the ground as possible, figuratively-speaking. The fact that they even allowed him the luxury of having a family was… surprising, to say the least.

But it was through S.H.I.E.L.D. that he also met Natasha Romanoff, the aloof, sexy, powerful spy that could easily kick his ass on her very worst of days. And boy, was she having the _worst_ day when they’d met. A lot of unfriendly people wanted her dead, and she couldn’t afford to keep looking over her shoulder, all alone.

Clint had been sent to deal with her, too, _permanently_ , but he’d made the call on his own. He figured he had a little clout, what with all his training in reading rooms, reading people in general. He could make Fury see the use in Black Widow’s talents—after all, she was _definitely_ an upgrade compared to _his_ measly skills (well, minus the knack for archery). …Honestly, he didn’t have to sell her at all when the time came and they were standing in an unlit hotel room with the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. just sitting there in the sole recliner, staring at them with his one good eye as he always did. The lithe redhead did not flinch under his gaze; no, she moved into work mode and sold herself to him immediately. She knew her worth and hardly sold herself short.

Fury was, as was always the joke amongst his agents, the “ultimate spy”, so the fact that he knew Clint had tangled with the Widow and ended up this way was ultimately not so shocking. In the future, Clint would often find himself wondering if Fury hadn’t already known Natasha’s path and aligned it with S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Hawkeye, allowing the two to cross and entangle themselves forever.

The director accepted his new agent with open arms, only insisting that his dearest Hawkeye watch the infamous spider. Bond with her. Steer her in a positive direction. Teach her their mannerisms. Make her “useful” to their cause. She took little persuasion; some part of her was a deadly ballerina after all.

Clint could never be certain she actually _knew_ ballet, but he chose to keep that to himself. It was a part of her life that she no longer acknowledged. He _could_ be certain of one thing though.

He and Natasha were perfectly in sync. At first, it didn’t make any sense to him. Was she extending an effort to slip into his movements, like the perfect glove, so that their partnership could be as effective as possible? He wouldn’t put it past her—she was certainly talented enough. He’d try to trip her up with the occasional oddity, but she’d be right there with him every step of the way. A delicate dance. And, soon enough, the oddity became part of him, just so he had an excuse to keep up the dance.

Maybe she really _was_ a ballerina.

Having a friend in their world was dangerous. Betrayals, double agents, mind control, these were things they dealt with on a regular basis. As the world constantly shifted around them, Clint learned who he could trust with Natasha. There were the few core agents like Coulson and Hill—people that were in Fury’s inner circle. More recently, the reanimated Steve Rogers fit the bill. Clint wasn’t sure he could trust Captain America with his beloved Nat, but she seemed to trust him more than, well… anyone else. Amusingly, each and every one of these very few people had one thing in common: they were all married to the job.

But Clint wasn’t just married to the job. He had a wife. He had a home.

He didn’t see either very often.

They had their share of troubles. Laura wanted him home more often, but Fury wanted him elsewhere and that was part of the agreement. Laura had a few friends she had made in the neighboring town; they helped her during the first pregnancy when Clint couldn’t be there. Clint knew that at least one of her “friends” was another agent undercover. That was just how S.H.I.E.L.D. handled situations.

He couldn’t remember why Natasha showed up at the house the first time, if he ever knew at all, but Laura immediately pegged her as a coworker of his. Laura knew all about S.H.I.E.L.D., after all. The supportive brunette welcomed her newest friend with open arms and brought her inside. Clint came home to find an injured Natasha, fully bandaged and healing well, sleeping in young Cooper’s room as an honored guest. Laura simply raised her eyebrows at him and everything moved along as normal. Instead of a couple, they were suddenly a trio.

That was when life began to take an unexpected turn.

Clint and Laura’s family continued to grow, and Natasha and Fury had the honor of being godparents. A family of agents, as Tony Stark would one day call them. Clint hadn’t realized just how happy this jigsaw made him feel until the next mission that Natasha failed to report in on.

Fury wouldn’t clear him to go to her.

He couldn’t leave his post. Period. He was the sole person working security on that mission that Fury had any trust in. He _had to be there_. For the first time in his life, his mind could not focus on the mission. He got lucky in that his target was so awful at covert operations that he was able to take them out pretty easily in the dead of night, allowing the other agents on duty to clean up… but it could have gone so much worse. He could have failed. He could have been stuck watching that creep forever. Natasha could have never come back.

The moment he was cleared for leave, he sneaked away to her latest apartment on foreign soil. They were always temporary little things, buried away in different cities around the world. Wherever it was she was needed at the time. She’d let him know whenever she could; it was rare that Fury blocked them apart from one another in their missions. Clint arrived ready for anything, and found himself sucked headfirst into a whirlpool of conflict. A mission gone bad, goons for hire on the attack. Natasha didn’t need rescuing—but she could use backup.

The ravishing spy had taken on a secretive terrorist cell’s base all on her own. Most of her missions were like that. Occasionally, Fury sent her alongside the STRIKE team, but for whatever reason, this was not one of those times. It didn’t take very long listening in on communications to find out what was going on, though it took actual skill to pinpoint his friend’s location and catch up to her. She was on the move. Dancing, always dancing through the armed forces, leaving a trail of red in her wake. Natasha had holed herself up within the base to extract information for S.H.I.E.L.D.—stuff Clint wasn’t in the know about. All he had to do was open a way out for her.

Simple enough.

Using the signal only the two of them knew, Clint let her know he was there, and the rest was sheer magic. He set up outside the base and began picking off the guard. This was the sort of work he was best at, after all.

It was one long, strenuous night of advances across the field of battle. Clint had long ago come to terms with the amount of dead he would have to leave in his wake to get where he needed to be; all he cared about was helping Natasha break through the line. Bodies be damned. He had his own secretive views on how to deal with extreme criminals; he wasn’t about to hesitate now.

He felt as though he had stopped making headway for a terrible moment, until he realized the terrorists had bundled up defensively from all sides now and had begun to drop without his doing anything. The tide of battle had shifted. Natasha was making her stunning entrance—literally. S.H.I.E.L.D. had gifted her with a curious, high-powered taser of sorts. An early model prototype of what would become one of her main accessories in combat, the Widow’s Bite.

Clint saw an opportunity; he took it. He jumped down from his perch as she drew even with him. They flashed their teeth at each other and went back to back, Clint clearing their path to freedom and Natasha shooting the bloody hell out of the reinforcements, all the while making small talk. They didn’t have a smooth exit, not really. Natasha asked Clint for his number. Seventeen. Hers was twenty-two. That made thirty-nine. “You wanna make it fifty-four?” she had asked. They weren’t so far from clearing the base, really. It was just the more skilled of the terrorists remaining. Well, skilled or lucky. It hardly mattered. Not when they were together.

“Why not?”

Another shift in their elegant dance; they were on the offensive. It was time to earn their bonuses.

~~~

Natasha’s count of the terrorist group’s present members was accurate, to say the least. There was no one left standing once the fifty-fourth and final member fell to their sudden assault. The mission was originally a stealth, covert-ops job, but Clint had assisted her in a cleanup that was surely going to be another group of agents’ job after Natasha delivered the intel. Preemptive cleanup directly tied to the intel gathering. Simple. Fifty-four birds with one bloody stone.

Natasha much preferred working with Clint over working with STRIKE, so, you know, bonus. She told him as much as they entered her safehouse and she jumped into the shower to clean off the filth of the fight.

“I’m sure Rumlow would agree with you there,” Clint said loudly so she could hear him over the sound of the faucet. “Dude’s a dick though, so who cares what he thinks.”

She didn’t respond. Heaving a sigh, Clint glanced around the tiny room. No one would ever assume it was the hideout of an intelligence agent. Natasha was very good at working minimally, without access to fancy technologies. Tech could make life simpler, sure, but it was also a liability, a crutch. She could do her work just fine without it.

Clint didn’t work in intelligence; his knack for reading situations was just a learned skill over the course of his lifetime. Hell, he had a hard enough time trying to decipher Natasha’s meanings some days. Tonight was going to be one of them, for sure. Any time they saw combat together, the acid in his stomach riled, and the redhead turned suspiciously playful. A defense mechanism, he knew, but why?

Tonight was the worst risk they’d had since meeting. What chance had she taken, how her cover was blown, Clint would never know. He couldn’t ask and she wouldn’t tell. But the fact was that she may have disappeared from his life forever and he would have been none the wiser. She had never disappeared off the radar longer than a mission’s parameters, not since joining S.H.I.E.L.D. It had shaken him, put things into perspective. He didn’t trust S.H.I.E.L.D. to tell him the truth of the matter, if it came down to that. He trusted them to tell him he needed to distance himself. Friendship was a luxury; friendship with a fellow agent was detrimental.

But this wasn’t friendship. Not anymore.

Clint flopped atop the cheap mattress in the corner of the tiny deteriorated apartment and waited, his hands thrown behind his head. Eventually, the running water cut off, and in another few minutes Natasha stepped into the room, dressed in civilian attire. She roughly tousled her hair in a towel, wrapped it up loosely into a turban, and sighed. “I’m due for extraction in three hours. Where’s your ride?”

Clint’s lips twitched. “Concealed it in a warehouse. You could come with me. Save them the trouble.”

Smiling, she shook her head, her red curls bouncing beneath the edges of the towel. “Mm, no. I have to report. I’m already late. I doubt he’d like you showing up there too.”

Fury. Clint laughed; the sound that escaped his lips was an awkward, warped attempt at his usual flippancy. How did she have more secretive missions than he did nowadays? Most of the time he was little more than perfunctory security!

Oh no. Her eyes narrowed at him, giving him that stare of hers that she reserved for these moments alone, away from all the seemingly nameless agents they worked with. “Clint. What’s with that laugh?”

“What?” He allowed his torso to spring up like a jack-in-the-box, looking her way. Staring blankly into the depths of her own, far more potent stare. Okay, she’d read him. “I’m not crazy, am I? What am I, chopped liver?”

Natasha didn’t take the bait. Instead, she wagged her hand at him to scoot over and sat in the gap he made. Not wanting to give himself away entirely, Clint took his gloved hand and raised it into his friend’s face as if to shove her away playfully. Still Natasha refused to take the hint. Reaching up, she enveloped his hand in her own and pulled it down into her lap. “Clint.”

He reflexively jerked, slightly, but enough that he immediately wondered if he had fucked this up, whatever “this” was. “I’m not going to enjoy this, am I?”

“You know you can tell me, don’t you?” she asked, staring directly into his eyes. Imploring him to speak. They’d had this conversation—or, rather, she’d attempted it—several times already in their time together. In the quinjet, in firefights, in quiet moments together as they deciphered debriefings…

“I’m not sure what’ll happen if I do.”

“The longer you don’t speak, the more risk you run of fucking everything up.”

“Well, let’s not be blunt, shall we?” he muttered, half-joking, half-terrified. In the back of his mind, he was watching his entire life crash down around him. Alone. He’d lose it all in one sentence, everything he’d ever cared about. And then what? Nothing left but security detail until he became too expendable.

“It’s up to you to not become expendable,” Natasha reminded him.

“Can’t you just punch me in the mouth?”

“You’d enjoy that too much.”

“Nada, I’m not a masochist like you are.”

“ _Clint_.”

“I can’t.”

He felt her grip on his hand soften; she wove her fingers between his own and rested her free hand on top of them. “Not everything is easy, Clint. I know you know this. But I promise. I won’t hurt you.”

 _I won’t hurt you_. Is _that_ what scared him? Because it was absolutely true—he was scared. Of what? This woman sitting beside him? Of what she meant? Feeling a sharp pang in his chest, he frowned. Then, slowly, his expression softened into worry. “Nat, you’re the world to me.”

With that twist of her lips that he had come to know so well, he watched as she scoffed softly and said, “Me too.”

Clint would always remember Budapest.

~~~

Clint hadn’t thought he could be more scarred. He knew as well as any what five years of loss and separation could do. But he had done the unthinkable. He had abandoned the one person he had left to lose, the one person he knew would wholly support him and be there for him as he grieved. He ran. Ran from her, silently screaming into that terrible night. He hadn’t wanted to escape to the dawn. He’d left it all behind.

Who was he kidding? Besides Natasha, there was nothing else left for him. The tide had risen and broken through the sandbags. There was nothing left but his dark heart, bruised and shrivelled and barely beating. He’d helped lift his beloved best friend from her own hellish darkness, once upon a time; he’d never bring her down that path again. He’d sink beneath the tide on his own.

Without anyone near to him, he’d slipped into what was always on the edge of his dark heart, the desire to do what others would not. What the law, his friends, the world, said should not be done. He evolved from the sarcastic-yet-cheerful Hawkeye to the tragically-violent, disconnected Ronin. He thought there’d be no turning back.

And yet…

She finally came for him. In truth, she’d been searching all along for him, but he knew her methods better than anyone, and the others, when looking for him, looked away in horror. He had relied on her emotions to keep them apart.

But she had something, something so tiny and fragile and shiny to share with him, and she didn’t want to return to the dawn without him. Couldn’t leave him behind in total darkness, knowing there was even the slightest chance.

Hope.

No matter how much he told himself he didn’t want it, no matter how he cried at the thought of it, he couldn’t ignore her. He’d always loved her, loved everything about her, just as much as he loved his family. And here she was, attempting to give it all back to him.

He didn’t deserve it.

She said he deserved so much more than the world had given him, and that she was sorry she wasn’t there for him. As if it were her fault. They didn’t have much time before they were needed back at the makeshift base of operations.

That night, she joined him in his grief. He was such a goddamned idiot. She had lost just as much as he had. She loved him equally, she loved Laura and Cooper and Lila and Nathaniel… She was the only one who could _perfectly_ understand his loss, his pain. Yet, despite how much she hurt inside, she had the resolve to keep fighting. To keep up protecting the world in the aftermath of the snap. He had gone off on a bender, murdering murderers and other cruel excuses for humans that didn’t deserve to live when the good ones had been lost to dust. But Natasha? She’d tried to _heal_ people. Clint couldn’t help but smile weakly at the realization; he’d made himself expendable to their save-the-world game.

That night, nestled in the safety of the retired quinjet, the pair of ex-agents held each other and cried. They cried for every single broken fragment of their lives. There would be no time after that moment. “Are you sure you can handle going back to the team?”

“You didn’t really want to give me a choice earlier.”

She shook her head. “That’s different. I don’t want to leave you alone, no matter what happens. Even if you’re unwilling to go through with this mission… I want you to be there when I come back.”

He… he couldn’t deny her that. Not again, he realized. Not when they were face to face like this. Nor could he send her on another mission against the mad titan without him. He already held immense regret at not being there for her during the first conflict.

Still… “I’m… sorry. I don’t think I can be Hawkeye anymore.”

“Do you think you could be you, at least?”

She stared at him; it was the familiar stare, the concern, the knowing, but softer now. She was being gentle with him. Treating him for what he truly was: fragile, broken. Despite her own fractured heart. “If I try and I fail…”

“You’ll have done what any of us did. Plenty of us fail from day to day. Some of us gave up over the years, too. You aren’t the only one.”

“I’m willing to bet I’m the only one on a suicide mission…”

With a half-hearted smile, she touched his shoulder. “You’ve failed that one spectacularly, thankfully.”

“If this mission fails…”

“We’ll have tried. We owe them all that much.”

That made sense, didn’t it? He wasn’t the religious type, but he had hoped, when he finally did die, that he was reunited with his family. What would they think, if he hadn’t tried? Never mind everything else in his life that he’d done. Could he live with himself, knowing he had not attempted to get them back?

“What if we fail?”

Natasha didn’t try to discourage him from worrying about failure. Instead, quietly, she murmured, “Stay with me.”

“Are you really sure you want that?” he asked, a broken chuckle escaping his lips. Humor, albeit dark humor. A smile forced its way on their lips.

“I’ve never been so certain of anything in my life. I never had a family before you, Clint.”

Laughing softly, tears flowing, they lightly pressed their foreheads together. They had to go.

~~~

And so, the Avengers pulled him back in for one last go of it. Because the team was as much a family as any of them had had back then. “Whatever it takes” they said. Natasha had always been his link into the team, had been there to shatter mind control, get him evac, have his back. So he followed her back to their newest operations. For this ridiculous plot nicknamed the “Time Heist”.

He and Natasha were to borrow the talking raccoon’s space ship. And fly. In space. To a far-off alien planet. As if the mission needed to get any more ridiculous. They were on autopilot, but still.

He had been succumbing to a slow death for five long years. But then she smiled at him, and something fractured in the wall he had built up around him. He smiled back. He still had her. She had never abandoned him, even after he’d been the one to vanish from her life without a single word, as he had been terrified of her doing all those years ago.

As they smiled and laughed, as the old jokes bubbled up from beneath the burnt oil and grime of the last few years, they hadn’t known what the Soul Stone was truly about.

From somewhere downstairs, Clint could hear his children doing the dishes. They continued onwards, always onwards, not quite knowing what had changed in their father. Never to know what he had done while they were gone. What he’d done for them. For the world.

Humanity had won.

The Vanished had returned. It would be a long, traumatic time as the people who’d felt they’d only been sleeping for a moment blended in with the people who had suffered for five years in their absence.

Clint buried his face in his hands, as he had done so many times since that final moment. His ritual had returned, only, now it never went away. There was no escape from it. No readjusting to his wonderful home life and family until the next mission.

He couldn’t unsee it. The tears burned his eyes, his skin, his breath. He had tried for years to let death take him, dragging as many of those that deserved it as he could, violently down into those still waters.

He’d found it now. He hadn’t survived the fall. He’d returned, but he was still there. He would always be there, beneath that cliff, lying atop that cold stone.

They’d had one last dance.

His ballerina.

**Author's Note:**

> Interested in chatting with me and other lost souls? Hit us up at my discord server [here](https://discord.gg/3TMx3vs)!


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